Re: man pages & info prefer HTML format

[Arsen Arsenović]

Dragan Simic <dsimic@manjaro.org> writes:

> On 2023-09-24 15:47, Bernhard Voelker wrote:
>> On 9/24/23 14:37, Dennis German wrote:
>>> After the  years and fine tuning of basic HTML, why aren't the man pages
>>> standardized to HTML format?
>>> Perhaps some users don't frequently enough reference man pages as they
>>> should and fewer use info , but (nearly) everyone uses a browser.
>> Sorry, I don't get the point.
>> HTML might be nice to read, but it's cumbersome to write.
>> Authors do not want to care about formatting too much.
>> Therefore, the documentation - both the man pages and the Texinfo manual -
>> is maintained in formats which are easy to write and track.
>
> Good point.  Another popular format, markdown, just confirms that the ease of
> writing is very important, together with the ability to view the source as-is,
> with no rendering applied, and to still be able to read it.

Sadly, Markdown takes the opposite extreme, where it lacks basic
features like indexing or cross-references, or footnotes, ...

Things like reST and AsciiDoc do better in that regard.

>> Besides viewing them with their principal reader (man, info, pinfo, ..),
>> those formats allow the conversion to several other nice formats ...
>> among them HTML.
>> The Texinfo manual is rendered into various formats: HTML, PDF, DVI, ASCII.
>>   https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/
>> And also the man pages are available online in HTML format:
>>   https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/
>
> ... and on many other web sites.
>
>> Have a nice day,
>> Berny


-- 
Arsen Arsenović

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